This invention relates to the field of digital signal processing and particularly to signal processing useful in digital music synthesis and other applications.
Digital music synthesis has attracted increased interest as data processors have undergone new developments which provide increased performance capabilities. Digital music synthesis has many applications such as the synthesis of stringed, reed and other instruments and such as the synthesis of reverberation.
In actual practice, it has been difficult to provide satisfactory models of music instruments, based upon quantitative physical models, which can be practically synthesized on a real-time basis using present-day computers and digital circuitry.
Most traditional musical instruments, such as woodwinds and strings, have been simulated by additive synthesis which consists of summing together sinusoidal harmonics of appropriate amplitude, or equivalently by repeatedly reading from a table consisting of one period of a tone (scaled by an "amplitude function") to "play a note." Another method consists of digitally sampling a real musical sound, storing the samples in digital memory, and thereafter playing back the samples under digital control. FM synthesis as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,018,121, has also been successful in synthesizing many musical sounds including brasses, woodwinds, bells, gongs, and some strings. A few instruments have been simulated by "subtractive synthesis" which shapes the spectrum of primitive input signals using digital filters.
All of the foregoing methods (with the occasional exception of subtractive synthesis) have the disadvantage of not being closely related to the underlying physics of sound production. Physically accurate simulations are expensive to compute when general finite-element modeling techniques are used.
Digital reverberation has also been difficult to achieve. Although digital music synthesis has employed digital reverberation as a post-processing function for many years, there still remains a need to be able to simulate with digital signal processing the quality of reverberation which exists in natural listening-space environments. The basic acoustics of reverberation in natural listening-space environments, such as concert halls, has a long history with many different design theories. The goal of digital reverberation is to produce digital signal processing methods which simulate the effect that a good concert hall or other good "listening space" has on sound. This goal is made difficult because typical good listening spaces are inherently large-order, complex acoustical systems which cannot be precisely simulated in real-time using commonly available computing techniques.
In architectural acoustics, an understanding of digital reverberation is important in the design of concert halls with good acoustical qualities. In digitally synthesized music, reverberation is a part of the synthesized instrumental ensemble and provides enrichment to the sound quality. For these reasons, there have been many attempts to capture the musically important qualities of natural reverberation in digital music synthesis.
Digital room simulation (reverberation) has been implemented by simulating specular reflection in actual or approximate concert-hall geometries. The diffusive scattering of sound in such natural listening environments must be considered in order to obtain high-quality reverberation models. However, practical models which accommodate diffusing reflections have been beyond the reach of present computing power when applied to listening spaces of nominal size over the audio frequency band.
In another implementation of digital reverberation, an approximation to the impulse response between two spatial points in a real concert hall has been recorded. The effect of the hall on sound between these two points can be accurately simulated by convolving the measured impulse response with the desired source signal. Again, this implementation leads to a prohibitive computational burden which is two to three orders of magnitude beyond the real-time capability of typical present-day mainframe computers.
The current state of high-quality digital reverberation based upon large (concert hall) spaces, although well understood, is too expensive to synthesize by computation. Because there is much detail in natural reverberation that is not important perceptually, models for reverberation need to be simplified so as to become computationally practical.
One example of a computationally simple model relies upon convolving unreverberated sound with exponentially decaying white noise thereby producing the heretofore best known artificial reverberation. The digital reverberator designs based upon quantitative physical models need to be replaced by models based upon simple computations which retain the qualitative behavior of natural listening space reverberation.
Some basic building blocks of presently known digital reverberators include cascaded and nested allpass networks, recursive and non-recursive comb filters, tapped delay lines, and lowpass filters. The early reflections can be exactly matched for a fixed source and listener position using a tapped delay line, and the late reverberation can be qualitatively matched using a combination of allpass chains, comb filters, and lowpass filters. Using a lowpass filter in the feedback loop of a comb filter simulates air absorption and nonspecular reflection. These known techniques for reverberation have been the basis for reverberation design for more than a decade. Although these elements do provide some essential aspects of reverberation, especially for smoothly varying sounds at low reverberation levels, they do not provide reverberation on a par with excellent natural listening-space environments.
In accordance with the above background, there is a need for techniques for synthesizing strings, winds, and other musical instruments including reverberators in a manner which is both physically meaningful and computationally efficient. There is a need for the achievement of natural and expressive computer-controlled performance in ways which are readily comprehensible and easy to use.